A call from the heart against her class

Catherine Liu

I just finished Dr Catherine Liu’s newest book Virtue Hoarders this weekend. I can easily say that it is, though perhaps not a polished work of exhaustive and objective scholarship (which it never pretends to be), a book after my own heart. Concise, impressionistic and self-avowedly polemical, Virtue Hoarders is a full-on broadside against the ‘progressive’ pretensions of the professional-managerial class, or ‘PMC’. Virtue Hoarders deflates the professional-managerial class’s self-appointment as a vanguard of liberation, and exposes its actual rôle as an ideological handmaiden and propagator of capitalism. It carries this argument forward in the same vein – which Liu herself acknowledges and celebrates – as Christopher Lasch, Barbara Ehrenreich, Diane Ravitch, Michael Lind, Angela Nagle and Amber A’Lee Frost. The punchline is in fact a call to class treason: a member of the PMC calling other members of the PMC to repent of, and renounce, their support of capitalism, and to rebuild actual solidarity to with the working class.

Catherine Liu’s argument is fairly straightforward. She argues that the upper middle class has come to project an image of itself as a kind of vanguard of virtue. The professional-managerial class conceives of itself as blazing a brave trail of liberation for humanity, through the personal lifestyle choices and consumption habits of its members. The professional-managerial class presents itself as having forged a path to the end of the world’s problems through cultivated pieties of gender radicalism and ‘woke’-ism. It attempts to cast itself as more virtuous than the hoi polloi, based on its embrace of postmodernism, based on its reading and dietary habits, based on its sexual mores and childrearing methods. Liu draws a clear line from the ‘free love’, countercultural ethos of the hippie of the 60s, to the rapacious hedonism and predatory self-interest of the yuppie of the 80s.

At the same time, Liu argues, the professional-managerial class has been busily kicking away the ladder it climbed up on, and blaming the working class for its perceived failures of moral constitution. If the poor could only eat, read, screw and raise kids like us, the professional-managerial superego says, they wouldn’t be poor, and then we shouldn’t need a safety net or a state oriented toward the common good. The professional-managerial cultural diktats in fact put a great deal of psychological and financial strain on the poor, and also make it harder for the poor to access or even be offered public assistance.

Liu’s writing here can, as I said before, often be impressionistic. It may not be entirely obvious why she begins by levelling the same sort of caustic polemic against Gabriel Winant that Georges Sorel reserves for the likes of Jean Jaurès. It might also seem a bit baffling at first, why she chooses to ‘zoom in’ on the Sokal hoax, on Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird and the Yale-based New Criticism, or on Rolling Stone’s misadventures in reporting campus sexual assaults at UVA. But when one looks at the way that Liu connects and composes these vignettes, the overall picture becomes clearer – that in each case the professional-managerial class actors are seeking to tear down the preexisting standards of academic or professional or personal sexual behaviour, and replace those standards with ones that self-servingly promote their own material interests. It is not a style of argument that all will find convincing. However, one cannot help but admire Liu’s gift for deftly and poignantly illustrating trends with a few simple strokes of comparison and argumentation.

It also quickly becomes clear that as Liu argues for greater empathy for and compassion towards the working class – one that goes deeper than merely a performative exercise of putting oneself in ‘someone else’s shoes’ vicariously by reading Harper Lee – she is making a deeper and profounder argument. She is waging a battle against postmodernity as a whole and the ‘floating signifier’ in particular, and in favour of an older way of doing politics that is grounded in concrete material realities. She places herself on the side of ‘good enough parenting’, Medicare for All, childcare for all, professionalism (as opposed to expertise) and objective reality (as opposed to social constructivism).

Some of the stances that Liu takes in Virtue Hoarders will, I’m sure, be dismissed as ‘conservative’. She rejects, for example, the narrative of the 1619 Project. She has a certain degree of contempt for the sort of ‘sex-positive’ feminism that imagines the material conditions of all women to be unconstrained enough for perfect consent to be normative. In Liu’s view, such feminism ignores the œconomic and material constraints that many women live under, and fails to account for instances in which women’s bodies are sexually exploited by their bosses. Liu highlights the oscillation in the professional-managerial imagination between a sterile, plastic, commitment-free world of sexual adventure (in reality open only to the affluent), and moral panics over imagined or real transgressions against puritanical norms of sexual expression (whether by men or by women), and points out that these panics invariably miss the point and serve to generate a great deal of performative outrage but little real lasting benefit for women. She also has a certain degree of contempt for the sorts of identity politics that discourage underprivileged groups from banding together in common cause, but instead seek to form networks of patronage and dependency that are fully compatible with American late capitalism.

But these are merely the consequences of a view that takes class seriously. Liu may occasionally sound like Sorel in her polemics against her class, but her conclusions are markedly different. She champions an ‘unglamorous’ left politics, devoid of ‘new pronouns’, ‘fancy neologisms’, affect and posturing, which is grounded in ‘good statistics, objective reality, and the power and uncertainty of the scientific method and reason’. In other words: she is proposing a realist direction for the left. In order to get there, though, the professional-managerial class must abandon its own self-righteous, faux-radical posturing and learn to criticise its own material interests and behaviours.

There is something in Liu’s final exhortations against the self-righteous pieties of the PMC that sounds, at least to this Orthodox Christian’s ear, quite familiar. This past twenty-first of February was the Sunday of the Publican and the Pharisee, and of course the relevant Gospel verse is the one from St Luke 18. Notice that the Pharisee in this passage comments upon his own righteousness before God – we could also say things like ‘the right side of history’ – by pointing to his eating habits, his spending habits, his charitable giving and even his sexual habits; while the tax collector stands far off, holds his head down, beats his breast and humbly asks for God’s mercy. It would have been known to Christ’s audience in His day, that the Pharisee was meant to represent an upper middle class reformer: a literate Jew knowledgeable in the law, who carefully followed all the præcepts, avoided debt and cultivated ritual cleanliness for himself. The tax collector was a ‘deplorable’ of his day: a man who worked with the hated idolatrous Romans and incurred debts which he paid off with ill-gotten tax money.

In our modern understandings of the dynamics of debt and cleanliness, we have told ourselves stories about which people are ‘responsible’, which people are ‘successful’, which people are ‘deserving’ – and which people are not. The professional-managerial class has worked actively to shape these stories in ways which accrue these virtues and perceptions to themselves… and deny them to the working class. When Liu says, toward the end of her book: ‘We should be heretics; we should blaspheme’, what she means is that we must reject these standards of virtue which revitalise and reimbue the pagan, peripatetic notion of ‘moral luck’. Her prescription – that we should actively reject ‘the cloaks of virtue, erudition and detachment’ and instead agitate for the older standards of excellence that were achievable by the working class – is the same call that characterised early Christianity’s radically-universalist overturning of Platonic-Aristotelian virtue ethics. Liu’s call to a humbler, less glamorous politics in support of the working poor, is the rejection of the self-righteousness of the Pharisee in the parable.

In sum, Catherine Liu’s book, short and sweet, is profound and provocative. Not only so for the quality of her writing, but also for the impressive array of intellectual resources she marshals into the lists. My own reading list has expanded quite a bit following Liu’s bibliography and acknowledgements. Her willingness to engage with the marginal, and sometimes ‘cancelled’, figures of both the twentieth and twenty-first century left, has enriched her narrative materially, and certainly broadened my horizons. It’s my hope that she’ll flesh this short volume into a longer, more comprehensive work… but even if she doesn’t, this is a highly worthwhile contribution to our current political moment.